


Day in the Life

by Laughsalot3412



Series: Saints 'verse [2]
Category: Boondock Saints (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Gratuitous brother touching, The boys have a Mission from God!, You know there is, as always
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 03:06:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5851660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laughsalot3412/pseuds/Laughsalot3412
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was like some kind of bizarre sleepover, except that he was a prisoner, and the other two guests were murderers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day in the Life

**Author's Note:**

> You guys have all been so welcoming! Thanks BDS fandom! 
> 
> Translations for the languages are at the bottom.

 

Normally when he woke up, Victor Hendrickson liked to drink two cups of black coffee, eat three eggs and a piece of toast—all in complete silence. He liked to wake up slowly, preparing his brain for the rest of the day.

Lying on a thin mattress in a dim motel room, it was clear to him that the universe had not been paying attention to how he liked his mornings, because it was screwing up his order in a big way.

“Get off.”

“You’re the one who rolled on me during the night and half smothered me. This is revenge.”

“Your toes are fucking freezing.”

“And your hips are boney, but you don’t hear me whinging about it, do you?”

“You wouldn’t have anything to whinge about if you got off me.”

“I am doing a brotherly good deed, Murphy. I am shielding you from the bitter cold with my own body.”

“You’re crushing my lungs and you’re doing it on purpose.”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“Am not.”

Also, Hendrickson’s wrists and ankles were duct taped together. Conner MacManus had threaded a long loop of rope between Hendrickson’s arms and then tied the ends to a leg of the other bed. The one that was currently occupied by two bickering serial killers.

Hendrickson’s rope leash was long enough for him to wiggle upright and balance on the edge of the bed. He didn’t want to try standing up just yet—partly because he hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday at lunch, and partly because his feet were numb from the tape.

It was cold in the room, a damp chill that clung to his skin and made him shiver. He hated Boston so much.

The mound of covers on the other bed shifted, and two sets of sharp eyes peered out from the blankets.

“It’s only five o’clock. You might want to stay in bed until it gets a wee bit warmer,” Conner advised. He was jammed between Murphy and the wall, and all Hendrickson could see was the fluff of his light hair and the glint of his eyes. “We’re certainly planning on it.”

Murphy was on the edge of the bed closest to Hendrickson—so close that he could have reached an arm out and touched him. Murphy’s whole head was out of the covers, and he watched Hendrickson’s every move with a coiled intensity. Hendrickson didn’t plan on giving Murphy any reason to unleash that waiting violence in his direction, and so he swung his legs back onto the bed and clumsily pulled the blankets back up around himself.

It was like some kind of bizarre sleepover, except that he was a prisoner, and the other two guests were murderers.

Murphy watched his retreat with a slow smile of satisfaction, then turned around to face his brother again. The blankets slipped off as he shifted, exposing the lean lines of his naked back.

And hadn’t _that_ been fun last night, when Hendrickson had been tied and helpless, to see the MacManus brothers shrug out of their clothing and flop into the double bed together. Hendrickson had sat on his bed, frozen with a disbelief that bordered on horror, because in his experience, there was only one reason two adults would sleep together naked. But Conner and Murphy had bitched back and forth about who was in whose space, and then had fallen right asleep.

Now, Hendrickson watched as Conner’s arm reached across his brother to tug the covers up again, and Murphy used his good hand to thump their pillows into a different shape. They used their bodies like they were parts of one machine. Maybe that’s why it didn’t matter where they slept.

Hendrickson and his ex-wife had slept on opposite sides of their king-sized bed. Sometimes, when the sound of her breathing had grated on his nerves, Hendrickson had slept on the couch.

Conner was right—it was very early still. Hendrickson expected the brothers to drift back to sleep, but instead, they murmured quietly to each other in the dim morning light.

“How far behind are we?” Conner asked.

“Not so much,” Murphy said. “It wasn’t a bad week to get arrested, actually.”

“When does that one gentleman get out?”

“Thursday.”

“We’ve got time.”

“Aye. We should clean this shitty room.”

“Mam would have a fit if we let company see it.”

Hendrickson didn’t mean to let out a breathy laugh. He blamed nerves and hunger and exhaustion.

Murphy rolled over on his back and looked at him. “What’s so hilarious?”

He might as well go for it. “You two. You have a FBI agent tied to a bed and you’re exchanging notes on the day like...like my parents.”

Conner leaned his elbows on Murphy’s chest, making Murphy grunt. “Your mam and your da still up and around then?”

“Yes.” Hendrickson wasn’t sure why he was talking to these men. Better to just shut up and get through this, but Conner’s voice was cheerful and winsome, and Murphy didn’t look any more homicidal than usual. “And they talk like that—what you’re doing. Every morning over coffee.”

“Hear that, Murph? You’re like an old married lady.” Conner dug his elbows deeper into Murphy’s stomach.

“Like hell.” Murphy shoved him off and then tackled him onto the bed. “Take it back!”

“Madam Murphy! Lady Dame Murph!”

They rolled and kicked until they fell off the bed with a tremendous _thump_. Hendrickson was very pointedly not watching. There was only so much white-boy skin he wanted to see in his life.

Conner was laughing, and the warm sound of it trickled through the room until Murphy was laughing too. Hendrickson did not laugh.

The brothers didn’t say anything else for a while, just got dressed in jeans and white t-shirts. They cleaned up the mess in the room, throwing away beer cans and shoving laundry into the closet.

 _Company_ , Conner had said. Hendrickson didn’t think they meant him.

“So are you boys ever going to let me go?” Hendrickson said.

Murphy packed their first aid kit with his right hand. “Dovremmo sbarazzarci di lui,” he said without looking up.

“Non ancora.”

Murphy slammed the lid of the kit closed. “What the fuck are we waiting for? A divine message? Because I don’t think we’re going to get more than one in our lives, Conner.”

Conner rubbed a hand through his hair, looking almost embarrassed. “Ba mhaith liom é a fheiceáil sa lá atá inniu.”

Murphy looked at him like he was considering punching him in the face. “Ní bheidh sé difríocht a dhéanamh!”

Conner shrugged, smiling a little. “You never know. The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“That’s a no,” Hendrickson guessed.

“Trust me,” Murphy said, “if it was up to me, you’d be long gone.”

“We don’t have time to screw around with getting you back. We have to be here today,” Conner said. “We weren’t here yesterday, after all.” This last bit was addressed to his brother, and Murphy nodded reluctantly.

“You have a point,” he said.

“What’s so important?” Hendrickson said. “Drug drop?”

Murphy snorted.

“Weapons deal, black market?”

“You’ll see soon enough,” Conner said, his tone closing the subject.

 

 

An hour later, someone knocked on the door in the middle of a Bruce Willis movie. Conner turned off the TV and they both stood.

“You behave,” Murphy hissed to Hendrickson. “No scaring anyone with your FBI shit.”

“Right,” Hendrickson said, gesturing to himself with his bound hands. “I am so terrifying at the moment.”

Conner rewarded his humor with a grin before opening the door.

It was a woman, probably in her middle thirties, her light hair pulled back. Her shirt was faded and hung a bit loose, and she wore a worn pair of blue jeans.

Hendrickson considered the prostitute theory while she hovered uncertainly in the doorway, but rejected it. She didn’t look the type, and, well, he had a feeling that the MacManus brothers didn’t go in for that sort of thing. After seeing them together last night and this morning, he wasn’t sure if they went in for _anything_.

“I’m here to see the Saints,” the woman was saying. “Father Riley said I could find you here.” Her voice was strong and certain, but her hands twisted around themselves as she waited.

“Aye, well, you’ve found us,” Conner said. “The father is a good man.”

“You need our help,” Murphy said, and the change in him was amazing. His words were soft and gentle, the kind of voice he had used back in the station yesterday to ask Conner if he was all right.

“Yes,” the woman said. “I’m Molly. Will you listen?”

“We always listen,” Murphy said.

The woman turned around in the doorway and beckoned. “Shay,” she said. “Come along.”

She walked into the room, and a boy followed her. He was probably around ten or eleven, at that age when boys were all bones and sharp angles. He had Molly’s light hair, and it fell into his eyes as he stared at the carpet.

Molly’s calm mask stuttered a bit when she saw Hendrickson tied up on the bed. He waved both hands at her, indulging in a moment of smartass. “I’m not scary,” he said.

“We had a spot of disagreement,” Conner said breezily. “No matter. He’s harmless.”

It spoke volumes about the level of trust she placed in these men that Molly nodded, accepting that explanation. It spoke volumes that she closed the door of the room behind her and her son. Whatever her priest had said about the MacManus brothers, it had clearly been persuasive.

Conner crouched down in front of Shay until they were about the same height. Hendrickson saw the way the boy drew back into himself. Classic victim behavior.

Conner must have seen it too, because he shuffled back a bit. When he spoke, his voice was light and easy, the kind of voice that had _You can trust me_ humming behind every word. “Shay, is it? I’m Conner. You want to see a magic trick?”

The boy shook his head.

“Shay—” his mother began, but Murphy touched her arm.

“Why don’t you have a seat and tell me the story?”

They moved to the two wooden chairs in front of the television and Molly began speaking, keeping an eye on her son.

Conner had taken a quarter out of his pocket and settled himself on the floor. “Suit yourself,” he said to Shay. “I’m just going to do a wee trick here, but you don’t have to watch if you’d rather not. See, the coin is here in my left hand? And now—it isn’t!”

Shay looked down at him through his hair. “It’s in your other hand,” he said. He had a young, small voice.

Conner opened his right hand and waved his empty palm triumphantly. “You see, there! Magic.”

“It’s down your sleeve, then.”

“‘Tisn’t.” Conner shook his sleeves dramatically. “ _Magic._ ”

Shay was starting to thaw under Conner’s manic grin. He shrugged. “It’s all right, I guess.”

“Do you like action movies?” Conner asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who’s your favorite?”

“Charlie Bronson, of course,” Shay said, like Conner was stupid.

“See, now, I knew you were a good lad when I first laid eyes on you.” Conner was beaming up at the boy as if he’d just done something extraordinary. “You see the one when he uses all that rope?”

“And he climbs the building and parachutes off the top,” Shay said. He was coming alive, motioning with his hands and talking with enthusiasm. “Do you like the one where he blows up the train?”

“Of course I do. I keep telling Murph that we’ve got to try that sometime.”

It was like watching one of his best agents at work with trauma victims. Conner’s instincts were amazing—backing off when the kid needed space, then pushing in to form a connection.

“Conner’s good with kids,” he heard Murphy say.

“He hasn’t spoken to a man since it happened,” Molly said. They were talking softly, so as not to disturb the magic that Conner MacManus was weaving.

“He’ll talk to Conner,” Murphy said, sure as sure.

“And you talk to me?” Molly asked, smiling.

“It’s what we’re here for.” He was still using that gentle voice, the one that was so completely different from the psychopath who had broken his wrist to escape a jail cell.

It was, Hendrickson realized suddenly, a _professional_ voice. This was Murphy MacManus doing a job he took very seriously.

“Bill would come around just about every day,” Molly said. Her fists were tightly clenched. “I thought he was being nice, spending all that time with Shay. Trying to get me to like him, you know? I should have known. I should have. But who thinks of doing something like that to a child?”

Murphy’s eyes were dark. “Not someone long for this world.”

Shay was sitting on the floor next to Conner now, playing with the magic quarter.

“So, laddie. Do you know why your mam came here this morning?” Conner asked.

The boy shrugged. “To see you.”

“Aye, I got that much. About what?”

Shay turned the quarter over in his small fingers. “Dunno. Probably about the bad thing.”

“Someone fuc—messed around with you, then?”

“I guess.”

“When you didn’t want him to?”

Shay flipped the coin between his fingers. He tossed it and flipped it over. Heads. “Yeah.”

“Hurt you?”

Another toss. Heads again. “Yeah.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“No.” Shay curled his hand around the quarter and stared up at Conner with bright blue eyes. “It makes me want to kill him.”

Conner gave him a lopsided grin. “If I was you, I wouldn’t fret yourself on that account.”

“Next week,” Molly was telling Murphy. “Bail for good behavior.”

Murphy turned and looked at Conner, just a quick glance. Conner raised his eyebrows, and Murphy’s murderous smile was back. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He won’t be enjoying his freedom much.”

“The police.” The words burst out of Hendrickson. Everyone in the room turned and looked at him. “Go to the police, woman,” he said desperately. “For the love of god, don’t get mixed up in this.”

Molly regarded him coldly. “And what good will the police do me? Bill has friends on the force. It’s how he managed to get off with thirty days and a fine.”

“This is our business,” Murphy said firmly. “He broke the laws of God.”

“And he did it in our neighborhood,” Conner added.

Hendrickson hadn’t stepped foot in a church for decades. Faith had turned out to be too hard and too intimate. But, tied on that bed, he remembered a Sunday school lesson about the judges of ancient Israel. _“Dispensers of justice,”_ his teacher had said. _“The law in one hand and a sword in the other, and the voice of God ringing in their ears.”_

“Don’t you know who these men are?” Hendrickson asked. He wondered if he did.

“Saints.”

It was Shay who spoke, sitting on the carpet next to Conner. His voice was as steady and firm as his mother’s. “They’re our saints, sent to watch over us.”

Murphy’s smug expression when he looked at Hendrickson was enough to make the agent feel sick.

The conversation didn’t last much longer, and soon Molly and Shay were standing by the door again.

“Can I pay you or—?” Molly obviously didn’t know the protocol of hiring serial killers.

“Do you have any coffee in that bag of yours?” Conner asked.

“Afraid not. But tell you what…” Her smile was small but honest. “You boys come around the house sometime and I’ll whip some up.”

“Sounds grand,” Murphy said.

Molly put one hand on Shay’s shoulder. “I was wondering. Before we left, could you bless the boy?”

Conner and Murphy exchanged wary glances.

“We’re not real priests, you know,” Conner said.

“Which is why I’m not asking you to administer Holy Communion,” Molly said tartly. “He won’t go see the priest. He hasn’t been to mass in weeks.”

The brothers were having a conversation with their bodies. Hendrickson knew them well enough to by now to guess it was an argument. Murphy kicked Conner’s ankle.

“I suppose we could do a spot of blessing,” Conner conceded and kicked Murphy back.

Murphy crowded close to his brother, then reached out his good hand and rested it gently on Shay’s head. Conner did the same.

“May the Lord bless you and keep you,” Conner said.

“May he lift up the light of his countenance upon you,” Murphy said.

“And give you peace.”

“Now and forever more.”

“Amen.”

“Amen.”

Their fingers overlapped on Shay’s bright hair and curled together as if by instinct. With their hands joined and their bodies pressed close, it was hard to tell if they were blessing the boy or each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Italian:   
> “We should get rid of him.”   
>  “Not yet.”
> 
> Irish:   
> “I want him to see today.”   
> “It won’t make a difference!”


End file.
